Our purpose is to help leaders and organisations be successful as a part of, not apart from, society.
We are a partner organisation to Three Hands, based in London, UK, which has been creating business value and social value hand in hand since 2003.
Here in NZ we create leadership development experiences that are both strategically relevant to our clients and offer tangible, meaningful outcomes for the charity partners we work with.
We’re made up of a core team based in London and NZ, and we team up with thought leaders and fellow innovators in the People space – enabling us to have the right team on board for each unique project.
Meet the team
Bex Grace
NZ Partner
Three Hands NZ1
“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
– John F. Kennedy
I work with organisations, teams and leaders to enhance capability. Supporting them to create conditions where they AND their people can achieve, learn and enjoy (the 3 critical ingredients for sustained, high performance).
For over 15 years in NZ, UK and the Middle East, I have designed and implemented programmes that ensure talent planning and leadership capability sit central to business operations – and aspirations.
Today I’m more often helping leaders to share their authentic human side, helping leadership teams bring sustainability closer to the heart of their business, and helping whole organisations to connect the dots better between people, planet and profit.
Three Hands’ development experiences and workshops provide powerful, safe and relevant learning context for this to happen – enabling organisations to create business value and social value hand in hand.
I have a wonderful husband and two boys whom keep me grounded, laughing and fulfilled. When I’m not with them I’m usually outside somewhere swimming, cycling or running – living my mantra “Healthy Body, Healthy Mind”. I believe that next to coffee, swimming in the sea is one of the best things our world has to offer.
Jan Levy
Co-Founder / Director (UK)
Three Hands NZ1
“Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company’s existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being…”
– David Packard of Hewlett Packard
I read David Packard’s words in 2000, when in the midst of an MBA at IESE Business School, Barcelona, and in the same year I volunteered in La Paz, Bolivia, and witnessed the stark contrast between the few big companies there and the surrounding community; it was an “a-ha” moment that has led me to focus on the role of business in society ever since.
I joined the founder of Three Hands in 2005 and became MD in 2009. Together we pioneered the concept of experiential, community-based leadership development and I’ve worked over the past few years to develop and deliver a wide offering that supports clients to do business in ways that benefit society, and on growing the Three Hands team – slowly, surely and sustainably.
I’ve had the privilege of applying our thinking to leadership development at Sky, Nationwide and Vodafone; to CSR and Citizenship at RSA, Unilever and Lloyds Banking Group; and more recently to product development and innovation at Legal & General.
Jo Workman
Collaborator / Director of Workman
Three Hands NZ1
Jo has 18 years’ experience helping clients realise their performance objectives in both Europe and New Zealand. Specialising in the development of high performance mindsets (e.g. resilience, confidence, drive, accountability) she works primarily in the areas of leadership and sales.
Jo doesn’t believe in magic diet pills when it comes to creating sustainable behaviour change and positive performance improvement. It’s calories in and calories out. She challenges clients to consider whether they have the foundations in place to maximise the return on their learning development investment and then works with them to fill the gaps.
In a former life Jo was an academic who studied diversity and management education, including the quality of post graduate education in preparing future leaders. She draws on both her academic and corporate experience to create pragmatic solutions that are immediately obvious, to her clients and to theirs!
Three Hands and Jo work together to innovate and design learning experiences– incorporating powerful coaching partnerships to embed those (inevitable) powerful insights.
Karyn Gould
Collaborator / K3 Senior Consultant
Three Hands NZ1
Karyn is passionate about building “next practice” – the ways of being and working, to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
Her experience in business consultancy, as well as over 17 years in the People and Capability space, across a broad range of industry sectors, enables her to develop powerful insights to organisations. She draws on these insights to establish and provide pragmatic and valued solutions.
Working at K3 Consulting, she enables organisations, groups and individuals to effectively align their people strategy and organisational initiatives to achieve business, people and customer outcomes. Karyn establishes trusted relationships and partnerships, using her leadership, learning and communication experience to affect change and growth.
Three Hands & Karyn team up to deliver programmes that require experienced facilitation and real-time coaching, where leadership development becomes an experience -not a training.
Nick Mackeson-Smith
Collaborator / Director of Five
Three Hands NZ1
Nick is an expert in leadership development, executive coaching, learning strategy design and implementation, culture change and employee engagement.
He’s led transformative programmes in agile, technology implementation, diversity and inclusion, mental health and wellbeing, mindset and behaviour change, ways of working and learning enablement, and is very interested in building great employee experiences to drive great customer experiences which drive great business outcomes.
He’s a big room facilitator and public speaker, and is highly skilled in spotting and unleashing the potential in those around him.
He’s got 17 years of experience in doing the small stuff and the very big stuff at some of the world’s and NZ’s leading organisations – in financial services with Barclays Capital, Schroders, Lloyd’s of London, and Goldman Sachs. In consulting services with Deloitte. In the public sector with Auckland Council, and most recently in digital services and telecommunications with Spark New Zealand.
Three Hands, Nick and the team from Five come together to collaborate, design and deliver bespoke experiences to best serve our unique clients – and draw on our collective expertise. #Dreamteam
We Offer:
- ‘Plug-in’ workshops that fit alongside your existing programmes. We integrate social or environmental themes relevant to your business and critical for your future leaders to understand.
- Full development programmes with an experiential community project as the central feature.
- Exec and Senior Leadership Team experiences. Meaningful 1-2 day experiences creating space for connection to self, each-other, company purpose and community.
- Talent strategy, OD and Leadership consulting. Using our ‘connected leadership’ approach, we help you connect people and culture plans with purpose and performance for sustainable business.
All of our work is offered with personal and team profiling, 360 feedback and 1-1 coaching to embed learning and action insights.
